08/22/2013

A couple of months into a freshman seminar, Sarah Brylinsky sat through a PowerPoint presentation. It wasn't much more than a series of line charts from a 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. But the charts had pluck. Their lines were fire engine red, and they rose fervently up, up, following the perilous trajectory of greenhouse gas concentrations and surface temperatures. The final slide was just a quote from David A. King, the former chief scientific adviser to the British government: "In my view, climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today--more serious even than the threat of terrorism."

Eight years later, Brylinsky reflects on that presentation with the same intensity she felt back then: "That day, I had this realization that if I couldn't devote myself to ensuring that there would be a world in which I could play my music, then it really wasn't worth making music at all."